


fires on the road

by evewithanapple



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Gen, POV Outsider
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-22
Updated: 2020-07-22
Packaged: 2021-03-05 01:42:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,860
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25436362
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/evewithanapple/pseuds/evewithanapple
Summary: Saving someone doesn't mean they have to like you.
Comments: 63
Kudos: 331





	fires on the road

**Author's Note:**

> Contains descriptions of (off-screen) anti-Semitic violence.

_Seville, 1391_

Mama tells them to be quiet, as she hides them in the cupboard in the bedroom. “Don’t make a sound,” she says, just before she pulls the door closed. “No matter what you hear, don’t make a sound, and don’t move.” And the door is closed and the tapestry pulled over it, and Hania and Jaco are left in darkness.

The screaming starts not long after that, and Hania and Jaco forget what Mama told them and scream too, but the noise from outside is so great, no one hears them. After the screams come silence. There are still muffled noises from outside the house – Hania can hear them coming from the direction of the window – but nothing closer. She’s hungry and she’s frightened and her knees hurt from pressing into the floor of the cupboard, but she doesn’t dare move. Beside her, Jaco sucks his thumb and stares at nothing.

It seems like days but is probably only hours before they hear footsteps in the house again. Hania’s eyes widen, and she claps a hand over her mouth, but Jaco is too small and scared to understand: he starts to cry. The footsteps come closer, and then the _shush_ of the tapestry being pulled aside and the creak of the door on its hinges, and there is a man standing before them. His clothes are dusty and there’s blood in his hair, and around his neck is hanging the same emblem that the rioters wore when they burned the synagogue last week.

Hania screams.

The man holds his hands up and says “easy, easy,” but she goes on screaming until a woman steps between them. The woman has long dark hair and eyes like the merchants Hania once saw trading silk in the market. She makes hushing noises and picks Hania up, cradling her against her chest. Hania is briefly comforted until she sees the man pick up Jaco – still crying – and cradle him in one arm. She screams again.

“It’s all right,” the woman says, “it’s all right. We won’t hurt you.” Jaco doesn’t understand any of it, and stops crying, putting his head down on the man’s shoulder. Hania squirms in her rescuer’s arms, trying to reach her brother. The woman won’t let her go, but her eyes fall on the emblem. “Nicolò,” she says. “The crucifix.”

He looks down at the necklace – it’s made of wood, strung on cord – and twists his mouth, yanking it off with a single tug and flinging it into a corner. His expression smooths when he turns back to here. “There,” he says. “All right, see? We won’t hurt you, I swear it.”

Hania puts her face against the woman’s shoulder, hiding in her hair. The man sighs deeply behind her, and the woman says, softly, “you can hardly blame her,” before patting Hania’s back. “It’s all right,” she says again. Hania isn’t convinced.

Their rescuers take them into the kitchen, where there are two others – a man who has a beard like Papa’s, and a woman with pale blue eyes and hair cropped short and close to her skull. The man holding Jaco hands him to the other man, passing a hand over his hair as he does so. “I’m sorry,” he says, and it’s so quiet, Hania hardly catches it.

The second woman says, “Are there any others?”

“Not that we found.” The woman holding Hania jogs her gently. “Do you have any other family here, _nene_? Anyone still hiding?”

Hania shakes her head. It was only her, Jaco, Mama, and Papa; and Mama and Papa haven’t come back. Won’t come back, probably. Mama always promised, when she left, that she was coming back. She hadn’t promised this last time.

“They can’t stay here,” says the man holding Jaco. He’s gotten into the larder, it seems, because he’s feeding her brother a slice of orange. “The crowds will be back.”

“The crowds are everywhere,” the other man says. “In every city.” He sounds very tired. “The safest place for them is out of the country. Maybe Egypt?”

“What would there be for them in Egypt? An orphanage?”

“What is there for them _here_?”

“Cádiz,” Hania says. None of them seem to hear her, so she tugs on the woman’s shirt and says, a little louder, “Cádiz. Uncle Bechor.”

That was what Papa had always said – “If things get bad, we’ll go to Uncle Bechor in Cádiz.” He’d kept saying it even after things got bad, insisting that they wait to see if the storm would pass or if it would get _really_ bad. Then it did get really bad, and it was too late. But Uncle Bechor will still be there, waiting for them. He said so in his last letter.

The adults all look at each other. “It’s a week on horseback,” the short-haired woman says. “And if the riots have spread there, they can always get on a boat.”

“Your uncle,” says the woman holding Hania. “Do you know where he lives?”

Hania squirms until the woman puts her down, then goes to the drawer where Mama kept all of Uncle Bechor’s letters. She takes out the packet, then carries it back to the silk woman. “Cádiz,” she says. “He told us to come.”

The woman takes the letters from her, scans the top one, then tucks them inside her jacket. She and the two men all look to the woman with the cropped hair, like they’re waiting for instruction.

“All right,” she says. “Cádiz it is.”

* * *

They travel by horseback. Hania has seen horses before, but never ridden one, and she’s not at all happy when she looks down from her spot in the saddle to see how far there is to fall. She’s riding in front of the bearded man, who has both arms looped around her to keep her from tumbling off the horse, but every step jolts her, and she’s never felt less secure. Jaco, too small to sit properly in the saddle, is bound against the silk woman’s back with long strips of linen, and she almost envies him. She’s never before wanted to be smaller than she is, but Jaco has gone along with it all so easily. He hasn’t even asked after Mama and Papa after that first afternoon. Hania cries for them constantly.

The man who rides with her is patient with her crying. He doesn’t try to hush her or snap at her to be quiet, just pats her gently on the back with his free hand and sings songs in a language she doesn’t know. She shrugs his hand away, hunching her shoulders. Then he shows her how she can lean forward and press her face into the horse’s mane, and she likes it better that way. The horse’s hair is rough and warm, and her tears drip away into nothing. She digs her fingers into the mane so that she doesn’t rattle out of her seat, and stays that way as they ride. Once or twice, she even sleeps.

“How old are you?” the short-haired woman says to her after they’ve stopped for the night. Her brother is happily seated in the lap of the man who’d worn the crucifix, unconcerned with anything besides the shadow pictures the man makes against the rocks with his fingers. Hania does and doesn’t want to go and pull him away. She ought to, but he is content, and she is very tired.

“Seven,” she says, then reconsiders. “Almost eight.” She’s wanted to be eight for a long time. She couldn’t say why, but she likes the roundness of the number, the loops and whorls of it. It’s the first number she learned how to write.

“And your brother?”

“Two.” The man makes a rabbit with his fingers, and Jaco shrieks with glee. “He won’t be three until the fall.” Mama had called him her New Year’s baby, and there had always been honey for his birthday. There were no holidays close to Hania’s birthday, but there was always honey for her anyway. But there won’t be any more birthdays now.

“My mama and papa are dead,” she says. Her brother doesn’t know, and probably won’t understand if she tells him. She’s the only one who knows. Someone else has to.

When they get to Cádiz, she’ll have to tell Uncle Bechor. But maybe he already knows. All his letters had said _come quickly, come quickly, come before it’s too late_. He’d known something, anyway. More than Papa knew. Is she angry with him? She might be.

The woman looks tired. “I know,” she says. “I’m sorry.”

There’s nothing else to say. Hania doesn’t want to be comforted or cuddled by these strangers, and this woman doesn’t seem the type anyway. She gets up and creeps away, towards the man holding her brother. Jaco is slumped to the side, and Hania’s heart thumps in her chest when she sees – but he’s only sleeping. The man holding him is supporting him with one hand, and examining something with the other. When she gets close enough, she sees it’s a little book, leather-bound and weather-beaten. The cover is embossed with a little crucifix. So many crucifixes; she’s sick of all of them.

She tries to go quietly, but the man looks up at her anyway. He holds one finger to his lips, gesturing to her brother, then carefully lifts Jaco up and out of his lap, laying him on the ground. The man has fair hair, and it glints in the firelight. A shape moves on his other side, and it takes her a moment to realize it’s the man whose horse she rode on, stretched out on the ground, head cushioned on the other man’s ankle. It looks uncomfortable, but he’s sleeping soundly.

She points to the book. “What does it mean?”

“The book?”

“The cross.” She’s seen crucifixes all her life – Christians seem to love painting, carving, and etching it onto every available surface, and Seville was covered in them – but no one has ever explained to her what they actually mean. And she wasn’t allowed outside the ghetto without Mama or Papa, so there were never any Christians around for her to ask.

The man rubs his thumb across the worn leather cover. “It means . . . less than it’s supposed to.”

“That’s not an answer.” She puts her hands on her hips, glaring.

“It’s all the answer I’ve got.” She goes on glaring, and he relents. “It means sacrifice.”

“For what?”

“Not what, who.” He holds the book out to her. She does not take it. “All mankind. Sinners.”

“For _what_?”

He looks almost as tired as the woman. “There was a time, little one, I might have been able to tell you. Now I don’t know.”

“That,” she says, “is stupid.” And she picks up her brother, drags him several feet away (he doesn’t awake, and she doesn’t expect him to; he sleeps like a rock) before curling up beside him and going to sleep.

* * *

When they reach Cádiz and her uncle’s house, she doesn’t weep or fling herself into his arms the way Jaco does. She lets Aunt Ezter fuss over her and wash her and feed her, and stays silent all the while. She stays silent for days, to the point that she hears her aunt and uncle talk about her in low, worried voices in the next room while she’s meant to be asleep. She makes an effort to talk after that, just to make them happy. But she stays quiet when she can.

Their rescuers are gone. They vanished almost as soon as they deposited Hania and Jaco on their uncle’s doorstep, refusing all offers of food or a bed for the night. Jaco doesn’t seem to miss them, passing happily from their hands into their aunt and uncle’s. Hania doesn’t worry about him much. Everything goes so easily with him. It doesn’t fester, the way it does with her.

Still, she grows. She attends school at her uncle’s synagogue, still standing and unburned. The Christians here don’t seem to bother them as they did in Seville. Still, she sees crucifixes around town often enough. Sometimes she’ll stop in front of one and just stare, contemplating.

Years pass. She marries. She has children. Her husband takes over Uncle Bechor’s bookselling business, and her brother goes into the yeshiva. Her husband dies young, and she stays with her ageing uncle, watching as he apprentices her oldest son and helps find positions for her daughters. Life is peaceful. But she always keeps a careful eye over her shoulder, listens to the merchants’ talk and trying to scent out any change on the wind. She knows how quickly things can change.

It’s nearing the middle of the new century when she sees them again, and it happens entirely by accident. She’s sitting on her front stoop, chin resting in her hands as she watches the world go by, and she catches a flash of something familiar. It passes so quickly, she could almost assume she was mistaken, but she hasn’t survived for fifty years by mistrusting the evidence of her own eyes. She gets up and follows.

It’s the man she remembers, the one with the crucifix. He seems to sense her following him after a block or so, and whips around, one hand at his waist. She only raises her eyebrows at him. “You may try to kill me,” she says, “but I don’t know why you’d undermine your own efforts like that.”

He looks just as he did when she was a child, but she doesn’t accord that much importance; her memories, fourty-five years old as they are, are blurry. The face she remembers is superimposed over the face she sees now, and so she recognizes him. He doesn’t seem to feel the same way; he frowns. “I don’t follow.”

She ignores this. “You don’t wear your crucifix.”

He looks down at his chest, still frowning. “I haven’t,” he says, “in a long time.”

“You did in Seville.” He still looks blank. This does surprise her; she doesn’t know how many children this man has ferried between cities, but she thought the whole incident would be more memorable. “You frightened me with it,” she says, then adds, “I’m sure you didn’t intend to,” for fairness’s sake. She’s sure he really _hadn’t_ intended to. He’d just been, as she said back then, stupid.

Something in his face changes; recognition, perhaps. His shoulders relax, and he removes his hand from the pommel at his waist. “You’re well?” he says.

“As can be.” And she is. She has her children, and her home, and the business. There are many who couldn’t say as much. But her father never lived to see her married, and her mother never got to hold her grandchildren. His people did that. And he saved her from the rest of them, while he still wore their badge. She wonders if he recognizes the irony. Perhaps that’s why he doesn’t wear it any longer.

“Did you ever figure out,” she says, “what it meant?”

He meets her eyes. There’s a great deal of guilt in his gaze, so much so that she almost flinches back. She bears this man no ill will; Christian or not, he _did_ save her life. But she hadn’t expected her question to actually trouble him for more than a few passing moments. The few Christians she’s known haven’t been prone to self-reflection.

“You know, I’ve tried,” he says. “For . . . a long time.” He touches the spot on his chest where the crucifix would rest, if he still wore it. “But I don’t think I have. I don’t think I can.”

“I’m sorry,” she says, and is surprised to find that she means it. She doesn’t care how this man understands his God, but she doesn’t wish a crisis of faith on anyone.

“Don’t be,” he says. “There’s nothing to be figured out at all. It doesn’t mean anything.”

Hania wears no sign of her own faith, both because she doesn’t care much for jewellery and because a part of her is still fearful of what others might do to her if she did. It makes her no less faithful. She tries to think of a way to say this, but can’t. In the end, all she says is, “I hope you’re at peace.”

He just shrugs. “Peace can be found in many places,” he says. “I’ve found mine. I hope you have, too.”

“I have.” It’s a half-truth. She’s found as much as she ever will, after seeing what she saw. They all carry with them the places they’ve been.

He inclines his head to her. “May you keep what you’ve found, then.”

“And you.”

With that, he’s stepping into the flow of the crowd, and is gone in seconds. She’s quite sure, somehow, that she won’t see him again, and is content with that. Let him wrestle with his angels, whoever they may be, and she will go on wrestling with hers. Whatever God they pray to, they are alike in that.

She turns away and walks home.

**Author's Note:**

> The massacre of 1391was a series of anti-Semitic riots which took place across Spain - specifically Seville, Castile, Aragon, and Valencia - in, well, 1391. Pogroms were not uncommon across Europe in this period, but the 1391 massacre is widely seen as the worst of its kind in Spain, and was largely incited by a piece of shit archdeacon named Ferrand Martínez. 
> 
> This was meant to be a cute fic about the gang interacting with kids, and wow! It did not end up like that at all! But I also wanted to write something reckoning with the characters' position in history and the fact that they, canonically, have almost certainly been associated with some pretty awful shit (like, you know, the Crusades and also . . . everything the Catholic Church was doing in the Middle Ages) so this is what I ended up with.


End file.
